


The Wind off the Acheron

by guiltyparties



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Blood, Some Canon-Typical Violence, semi canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27520621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guiltyparties/pseuds/guiltyparties
Summary: He stepped into Jack’s office to see a tall man sitting in one of the upholstered armchairs across the desk, hair somehow both a little dark and a little dusty, dressed in an impeccable suit. He turned at the sound of the door and their eyes met when Will was too slow to look away.He would not know it for some time, but at this precise moment, thebeforecame to an end.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 58





	The Wind off the Acheron

**Author's Note:**

> somewhat/mostly canon compliant, but lots of interpretation and changing of some of the dialogue ^u^
> 
> ♞♞♞

There was _before._

And, as much as he wanted it, he did not think there would be an _after._

  
  


♞♞♞ 

Before, it was a childhood rife with pennilessness. He followed his father down to the shipyards in places like Greenville and Biloxi as soon as he could walk fast enough to keep up. As his father sat in a stuffy work shack he watched from wherever he could find a place to sit: empty barrels on their sides; cracked crates with the rotted plastic sides buckled in, the sharp corners digging into his legs; stacks of curling manuals whose pages had yellowed and begun to smell from the humidity. Every day he followed his father down to the shipyard to watch and ask questions, and eventually he became so good at it, his father had let him help. 

It never occurred to him that they were poor. Not at first. Just like it never really occurred to him that he had a mother: he knew that she had existed (he wouldn’t exist without her, after all, from what he understood), but she had been gone for so long that all he could picture of her was a shadow as it turned the corner in the hallway of his memory. _Your mama’s gone, Will,_ his father had said gruffly. His tone conveyed perfectly that no further questions would be welcome. _It’s just you’n me, now_.

It had been the only time he asked. 

While the poorness was not immediately recognizable to him as a child who followed his father to humid, bustling shipyards every day and saw the man at work, it became apparent over time. Kids at his first school in Greenville pointed out the way his shoes were ragged and fuzzy at the seams like at any minute they’d burst apart. Kids in Erie mocked the fact that his clothes never seemed to change; they _did_ , it was just that so many of them looked the same it began to be difficult to tell the difference. In Biloxi they whispered behind his back at the slightly fishy aura that clung to his clothes, calling him _Willy the Fisherman_. Sometimes they even denied him his claim to personhood, calling him simply _Willy the Fish_.

Will, who loved to fish off the dock outside of the work shack into the Mississippi Sound when his father was away on Cat or Petit Bois or Horn, couldn’t see why this was a problem. 

_They’re makin’ fun of you, son,_ his father had said one night, dark eyebrows furrowed in what Will would later identify as _parental concern_. His father dropped his fork and his palm rasped along the black stubble of his unshaven cheek. _Teasin’ ya about having a daddy who works in the shipyard fixin’ boat motors an’ such instead of workin’ some office_ _job_. It looked like he wanted to spit. 

But Will had merely shrugged. _I don’t care, Dad_. And that was the truth. The kids at school—none of them were his friends. His life was a routine of going to school until it was time to walk down to the shipyard, either observing his father or helping, and fishing, either with his father or alone. What the other kids had to say or what their parents did was no concern to him. Will had his life and he lived it. 

Later, as an adult but still in the _before_ , he would think about the way his father had looked when he stood up from the table and turned away. It had been a mixture of pride and pain—like the raising that his father had done had molded Will into something solid, hard to topple, but pained in that perhaps he had made him too independent, too durable. He would wonder what that look meant as he paced the lobby of a distastefully named museum years and years later and then would let it go. His father had been dead for a long time, so he would never know the answer. 

A man would approach him, then, so full of life and brightness that Will had to look away as if looking into the sun. The man stuck out his hand and smiled. 

“You must be Will Graham. Jack Crawford. I heard you weren’t very fond of what we decided to call it.” 

Will shook his hand quickly and then pushed up his glasses. The thought of his father’s expression and what it had meant, what it meant to be proud and pained at what you had made, disappeared, released downstream into nothingness. 

“You heard correctly, then.” 

The man laughed and it boomed in the spacious lobby, echoing off the walls. “Well, let’s take a look. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

♞♞♞ 

He had spent the rest of his formative years after his father died skipping from shipyard to shipyard across the southern and mid-western states, following the work wherever it took him. 

In the _before_ , this had been enough. There was still the rumpled look to him, sometimes; sometimes his skin would taste of salt from sweat and sea water and with his eyes closed he could feel the coarse wind blowing off the Mississippi Sound. Sometimes he didn’t just fix motors on shipyard boats—sometimes he was on them. Sometimes his days consisted of getting paid to drowse in a fighting chair while the sun reflected a burning effigy of itself on the water. 

But as his adulthood loomed, the efficacy of becoming his father hunched over a leaking motor in a humid or freezing work shack, depending on where he was and in what season, was no longer as strong as he had hoped. It dawned on him one day as a dog he wanted to keep but could not feed followed him home that perhaps their poorness—his and his father’s—had been a choice, at least to some degree, that his father consciously made. His father was intelligent and resourceful; the office jobs the other parents snickered about him lacking behind their hands would have maybe provided more luxuries for them, but as an afterimage of his father, Will understood that he found it soulless work. Menial. There were other factors that contributed to their poorness, some they could not change, but the work his father did in shipyards working on broken motors and building them from scratch and showing Will how to do it, too, was not merely a means to survival. It was simply happiness. 

But—even as an afterimage of his father, he awoke one morning and realized that there could be more to this life. Perhaps a life that paid retirement, a life where he had a 401k, a house out in the emptiness near a river, a spouse and dogs. There could be a life for him where he could wade into the quiet of the stream and stay there, for as long as he wanted, and would hear nothing but the noise of the water and the whisper of the trees. 

Law enforcement chose him, somehow, rather than _him_ choosing _it_. It certainly wasn’t easy. Many times Will came home with a scream in his throat, from frustration or anger or sadness. Sometimes the badge that he carried did little good but reflect back onto the world the dirtiness in which he was sworn to scrub away. It was not soulless but his nature made it so that he wore his soul on the outside, and everything he had to see and everything he had to do took little pieces of him as they brushed by. Will glided through the rest of university and working as an officer half asleep. 

And then homicide woke him up. 

♞♞♞ 

The rooms were filled with shouting. Flashlights swung frantically on and off the walls, sweeping, a pendulum or a metronome measuring the seconds as they ticked by. Sweat dampened some of his dark curls to his neck and he felt it soak his shirt collar. His gun was in his hand and it was heavy, sleek, a dangerous thing. He was a dangerous thing circling a dangerous thing, hiding out somewhere in the house. 

“Virginia PD!” An officer next to him shouted. His gun was also out, flashlight pointed, homicide badge clipped to his belt much like Will’s. He wore a kevlar vest over his powder blue button up, but the moonlight that leached in through the various open windows in the house washed it out to a dull gray. The darkness of the house where their murderer was hiding sucked at their outlines like a shroud. 

“Virginia PD! Come out with your ha—”

There was a span of time where Will could differentiate every single moment, from the one that had just happened to the one that would be coming after. He saw the blade flash against the moonlight and he raised his gun, hand shaking, but this moment became the next and then that blade was flashing not in the air but into his partner’s throat. That moment became the next and the powder blue shirt bleached colorless by the moonlight was now richly black where blood gushed against it. That moment became the next; his partner hit the ground on his knees with his hands clutching at the new smile that had been opened in his throat and _that_ moment became the one where the blade wanted him, too. 

_Pull the trigger, Will,_ he told himself feverishly. _Pull it, god damnit, your life depends on it—_

He couldn’t, though. He blinked and the moment had changed again. His gun was no longer in his hand and he was turning away, dress shoes slipping in the black blood pooled and cooling on the hardwood floor, and the moment had changed again. He tried to keep turning, to turn toward the entryway they had just passed through, to get back to the front door and back to the safety of the cruiser, but the moments kept changing and then that flashing blade was biting into his shoulder. It ached like a fire set in the skin as the blade bore down, tearing and slashing at the muscle, a desperate animal, something alive as the blade was yanked out. His own blood spilled hot down his back and was dyed black in the moonlight. 

_It can’t end like this. It can’t. There has to be more._

The blade sought him again in the dark. Will slipped in the blood and hit his knees before he was up again, heart thundering. White light glinted off the only part of the blade that wasn't sheathed in blood; it came down again in an unsteady arc but the rapid fire popping of gunshots aborted it before the motion could complete. He dropped to his hands and knees and took great, heaving breaths while blood pumped out the jagged slice their suspect had opened in his shoulder. Light, after so much darkness, flooded the house like a burst-open sun: suddenly the blood on Will’s hands and on Will’s pants and coating the bottom of his shoes was not a deniable, colorless black, but an irrefutable, violent crimson, like truth. 

Several pairs of hands were on him, then, hauling him to his feet and dragging him through the house while his head rolled unsupported by his neck. A darkness loomed in front of him, bottomless and empty. His eyelashes fluttered against the tops of his cheeks speckled with arterial spray and let them drag him toward it, wanting to protest but being unable. 

_This is not sustainable_ , he thought to himself, through a haze of red and blues, the jostling of his aching body as he was put onto a stretcher. _This life—it isn’t made for you. You don’t have the stomach for it._

When he awoke over one surgery and 16 hours later, the surgeon told him he would have a rotator cuff issue due to where the knife went in and then was viciously yanked out. It would probably be a problem forever, and that he wasn’t sure if a profession where he was, within reason, expected to shoot someone was really all that beneficial to him. 

“Have you ever been stabbed before?”

Will almost laughed, but it was from nerves, mostly, or something else. “No. I don’t—I don’t make it a habit. Nor do I intend to.”

The surgeon nodded. He was glad for not laughing—the surgeon looked serious. “Mr. Graham, I think you should find a new line of work.”

So he did. 

♞♞♞ 

It was a strange transition from field law enforcement to academia, although one that was not completely unfamiliar, in the sense that he spent his days hunched over and working, but on criminal psychiatric profiles and not boat motors. He had felt a steady departure from the life that he had when he was growing up; he still fished but only when he had time, and it felt like he never quite had the time. Late nights in his office with too much coffee and his eyes burning behind his glasses made him ache in a subtle way for that life, of noisy shipyards and fishing and the wind off the Sound. 

But this life could provide him with so much more: days turned into weeks and months and years, and suddenly he had a home in the emptiness near a river and several dogs. Money was not exorbitant, but it was enough that he never let a dog follow him home without feeding it again. Late nights became less frequent as a routine gathered, and he found that, just as he had dreamed so in the shipyards after his father had gone, he could wade into the quiet of the stream behind his house in the emptiness and the only sounds he heard were the water and the whisper of the trees. Sometimes the dogs barked and howled playfully on the bank while he stood in the flow and let the water part around him with his eyes closed, sometimes they stayed on the porch with their snouts between their paws and watched from afar. That black hole that had presented itself to him the night he’d been stabbed had seemed to close, and a peace that had the fragility of glass laid on top of it. Sometimes it called out to him in the grayscale of dark dreams but the voice was always muffled. 

But, as he had known it when his father died and he left Biloxi Bay for other watered horizons, it would not last long, and it would never be the same. It never did and it never was. 

♞♞♞

It was in the _just before,_ when he dismissed his class for the day, that a familiar man was waiting in the wings. He approached and Will looked away because, even after all this time, he was still too vibrant to look at directly. 

“Mr. Graham.” 

Will avoided his eyes. That glass peace laid upon the black hole over which he felt himself dangling was now webbed with great cracks. He was different; academia at Quantico had changed him in the way that law enforcement had, too, but this felt worse. Will spent so much time thinking as other people—murderers—that the strict lines of moral and motive felt blurred and close to losing shape entirely. This man in his classroom, both familiar and not, exacerbated that feeling.

“I’m Special Agent Jack Crawford. I lead the Behavioral Science Unit.”

Will knew that they both knew they had met. But Jack had extended his hand, anyway, so Will shook it. 

“We’ve met.”

“Yes, we had a disagreement about the museum when we opened it.”

“I disagreed with what you named it.”

Jack smiled at him. It was warm, friendly, in a way that made Will distinctly uncomfortable. It was genuine, but there was something that lay behind it, too, and the black hole from beneath called out as if recognizing it. 

“Have you changed your mind?”

“No.” 

“I didn’t think so. Listen, Mr. Graham—”

“Will is fine.” 

“Listen, Will,” Jack said, and paused, “I need to borrow your imagination.” 

The black hole hissed. But out of pleasure or fear, Will was uncertain, so he merely pushed his glasses up with some reluctance and followed Jack from the room. 

It was the beginning of the end that never came.

♞♞♞

Days later, after Jack had drawn Will out into the field (both figuratively and literally; Will could still see the girl impaled on the stag’s head when he closed his eyes as if the image had been tattooed there) Jack had called him to his office. The afterimage of the girl clung to his nightmares, and he awoke tired and drenched, but Will made no argument and just went. 

He stepped into Jack’s office to see a tall man sitting in one of the upholstered armchairs across the desk, hair somehow both a little dark and a little dusty, dressed in an impeccable suit. He turned at the sound of the door and their eyes met when Will was too slow to look away. 

He would not know it for some time, but at this precise moment, the _before_ came to an end. 

♞♞♞   
  


They exchanged very little in Jack’s office. Will, who had been unbothered by the lack of friendship from his peers as a child, was similarly unphased by the lack of friendships he had collected as an adult. Jack talked at him and at the man who sat beside him—Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a very revered ex-surgeon and an even more revered psychiatrist, if Jack was to be believed. Hannibal’s presence in the room meant very little; Will largely pretended that he wasn’t there, avoiding eye contact as he did with everyone else. He answered Jack’s questions when he could and provided his own when he had them. Hannibal, according to Jack, was also working on profiling the Minnesota Shrike. But there was a scrutiny in which he felt Hannibal observing him. Will could feel Hannibal’s eyes skating off of him, targeting various parts of his exposed skin like his throat or his hands; eyes that Will couldn’t quite name the color of because he refused to look at them long enough lingered on the corner of his unshaven jaw and made it itch. In fact, the short distance of the chairs in which they sat across from Jack’s desk made Will antsy, like he was sitting too close to something dangerous. 

Jack said something to Will and Will said something back. Hannibal chimed in with his languid speech, the words thick and accented in his mouth but eloquent and delivered the same way as a caress. Will suppressed a shiver and bristled. 

“Whose profile are you working on?” Then, to Jack, because he didn’t really want the answer: “Whose profile is he working on?”

He never really received an answer. Hannibal’s mouth moved around something that sounded like an apology but was really just a fancy shrug and a _we can’t help our nature_ speech. Will felt… he felt _exposed_ , almost, in a way that he did not like. Like Hannibal’s eyes on him had more purpose than just looking, like they were stripping him, down past his clothes and through the skin and burrowing in the bone. Something about the look burned him, deeply, Hannibal’s unashamed gaze on him the heat of the knife that had once punched into his shoulder. Only now that knife was being driven into his gut and he didn’t understand what that meant. 

Worse still, as he snatched up his things from the surface of Jack’s desk and left the room, he realized that the darkness inside of him that loomed like a lethal wave just before it broke, did not hiss like it did when Jack Crawford had come to him. 

When Hannibal was in the room, the darkness purred. 

♞♞♞ 

The nightmares continued. The glass that had webbed now started to crumble, and Will felt that any sudden move would make it give way, and he would plunge into that bottomless darkness. He gasped himself awake out of the murky depths of dreams that dripped in black and red, oblivion and violence, emptiness and blood. Sometimes when he awoke he thought for a single moment before it changed that the sweat soaking his shirt was once again the blood that had painted him red. 

He opened the hotel room door and found Hannibal standing on the other side of it. Will was barely dressed in his boxer shorts and the shirt he had soaked; Hannibal’s gaze was cool and unreadable but Will still felt naked, somehow. He avoided Hannibal’s eyes and resisted the urge to cover himself, waiting for Hannibal to say something so that he wouldn’t have to. 

“Hello, Will.” 

Will, glassesless, blinked into the bright sunlight. “Hello.” 

Hannibal held up a bag. It was a paper bag, and yet it still somehow carried the sophistication in which Hannibal carried himself, and Will did not like that he noticed. Hannibal’s gaze felt so heavy—his expression was neutral but it felt like a physical touch, two fingers pressed to the side of his throat, and it made him feel exposed much in the way he had in Jack’s office. 

“I brought breakfast,” Hannibal said to him, and his lips curled at the corner in the suggestion of a smile. “May I come in?”

Will wanted to say no. He wanted to slam the door closed between them and then he wanted to barricade it with every piece of furniture in the room. And it was strange—he wasn’t sure _why_. He had only met Hannibal recently and while his gaze was heavy and made Will feel more strange than he usually did these days, he did not _know_ Hannibal Lecter very well, and it was far beyond Will to be rude just because he was a little uncomfortable. 

And yet, even as he opened the door a little further and stepped away so that Hannibal could step in, he felt unsure. Hannibal’s elbow brushed Will’s bicep as he passed and the darkness purred louder. 

At the small table by the window of his motel room in Minnesota, Will sat across from this strange man and watched his oddly delicate hands as he removed the breakfast he had cooked and arranged it on plates that he had brought. He explained to Will in that lilting, rhythmic voice about how he had cooked it and why but Will was really only half listening; with Hannibal occupied by their breakfast he felt as though he could observe more discreetly and without the anxiety of being confronted. 

“Will?”

He realized, then, that Hannibal had finished arranging what he had brought and had asked him a question that he hadn’t heard. “Sorry. What did you say?”

“I said that I wanted to apologize for psychoanalysing you when we had only just met.”

Oh. _That_. Will blinked at him but waved his fork dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. Just—just keep things professional.” 

The corner of Hannibal’s mouth quirked and Will noticed despite his slightly older, handsome face being tilted down toward his plate. 

“God forbid we socialize like adults.”

Will opened his mouth and lied, “I don’t find you that interesting.” 

Hannibal said “you will”, but the truth was he already did. In some way. For some reason. He couldn’t exactly find it, he was fumbling for it in a room with the lights off, but he knew the reason had to be there. 

Their conversation turned to the case at hand for a moment, relaxing him, giving him a solid ground to stand on if just for a moment. He answered the questions that he felt he could answer without giving too much of himself away and Hannibal seemed to neatly sort them for his benefit anyway. 

“You know, Will,” Hannibal said, and the casualness of it made Will’s stomach turn, as though they were about to broach some subject he didn’t want to broach. “I think Uncle Jack sees you as a fragile little teacup. The finest china used only for special guests.” 

He had to admit—it sounded funny coming from him. Will laughed and leaned back in his chair, thinking about it; and, yeah, Jack probably did think that about him, and yet Will knew it wouldn’t stop him from using Will to the extent of his limits if it served whatever purpose Jack needed. 

Will could have—should have—left it at that. He did not really want to know what Hannibal thought about him, and at the same time did. It shouldn’t matter and it was irrelevant, anyway: Will was useful to Jack no matter how Jack viewed him. But the heavy hands of Hannibal’s gaze pressed down on him, one on his throat and the other squeezing his heart in a fist. The words tumbled from his mouth before he could stop them. 

“How do you see me?” 

It was silent. So silent that Will could hear the branches of the naked winter trees outside rub together in the slight wind. Dead leaves blew and scraped across the concrete doorstep of the motel. Watery sunlight filtered in through the window and bathed Hannibal in its light; it flushed him a pale gold. His eyes were an unspeakable shade, some color that didn’t exist and yet did, and Will felt suspended in the depths of them when he dared himself to look. The morning sunlight washed him to brushstrokes of greys and golds, a renaissance painting of a saint sat across a table. 

But for all that the light did to paint him as an angel, the next words that left his mouth drew back the curtain the slightest bit on the devil that he really was. 

“The mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by.” He held Will’s gaze a moment longer, then resumed eating. “Finish your breakfast.”

But Will could not. He felt as though he could never eat again. Hannibal had looked away and yet he still grasped Will in his heart and in his hand, suffocating him, bringing him to ruin. The air in the room was gone and some fundamental _thing_ had passed between them, some nonverbal exchange had taken place without Will ever saying a word; and despite the fact that he had never spoken out loud it still felt as though he had said _yes_ to something, some question that Hannibal had not outright asked but buried in his observation. He had acknowledged the danger that lay coiled inside of Will like a downed power line and that Hannibal hoped to shock him awake. 

Later, when Will fired his gun ten times into Garrett Jacob Hobbs and tried to close the slash he had opened into his daughter’s throat, and as Hannibal had gently pushed his hands away, he realized that he would not have to. By killing Garret Jacob Hobbs, Will had shocked himself awake; Hannibal was just there to catch him when he did. 

He stood by his car and watched them load the gurney with Abigail on it into the ambulance. All the commotion from the other officers, the other EMTs, all of it was background noise, a track underlaid the whisper of Hobbs just before he was dead. _See_? It whispered. _See_? 

Hannibal climbed up into the ambulance beside Abigail, his hands to the wrist gloved red in her blood, the crisp white cuffs of his dress shirt beneath his suit ruined with it. Hannibal looked up, searching for him, meeting his eyes when he found him, watching him. There was blood on Will’s glasses. Their eyes held until the doors of the ambulance closed and it pulled away.

The outline of Hannibal sitting across from his motel table that morning burned like a sigil when he let his eyelids flutter closed. The weight of his gaze, of his truth, of their combined truth, of whatever question Will had said yes to that Hannibal never had to ask, was enough to shatter the glass. Will fell through it into that infinite darkness and all the darkness did was laugh and laugh and laugh as it roared itself awake. 

♞♞♞ 

There was no after. 

There was no after because Hannibal destroyed any concept of an after for Will. He had provided the final swing of the hammer to Will’s peace, his sanity, his tether to the waking world. Hannibal had done everything he could to prevent Will from having an _after;_ every time it looked like he would get one, Hannibal would pull the rug out from under his feet. 

It was the framing Will for murders he didn’t commit, and then absolving him of those murders in almost the same breath. It was the dance that they did, the mongoose and the cobra that circled each other and poised to strike, an ouroboros of danger. It was that dagger in the gut that Will felt at the way Hannibal looked at him. That heavy gaze that squeezed his insides with both fists. That look that twisted him inside out, made him burn, made him want something he didn’t know how to ask for. It was the constant battle between what was right and what was wrong; it was the dilemma at the table that his father turned away from. 

There was no after because Hannibal had laid out the trap and Will had fallen into it, and at some point, he was no longer the animal chewing at its own leg to escape it. They gravitated around each other, mirrored each other, both consciously and not. Their game was intelligent, but sometimes it was childish and cruel. There was Will’s stint in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which became Hannibal’s stint in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Hannibal’s imprisonment was merely a result of a childish sense of _if I can’t have Will then no one can_ ; having decided that the freedom he once tried to gut Will for taking was less important than being an eternal thorn in Will’s side. 

Will knew this. He knew all of it. He knew Hannibal was in love with him and he knew that no matter how many layers of paint he put over it, he was just as in love with Hannibal. Every moment changed from one to the next and across all of those moments was the ghost image of Hannibal kissing him while they drowned together in blood and he knew it could never be any other way. He had made his peace with it and knew Hannibal had, too, even if Will had scorned him more than once. 

But the darkness was hungry. It always would be. This was the _yes_ that Will had given him. 

Dolarhyde lay dead on the stone of the clifftop and Will saw again that single moment that was burned across all the others: Hannibal reaching out for him and pulling him close by the waist, slippery fingers gripping the fabric of his shirt. The ghost of breath across his mouth where Hannibal spoke softly to him, murmuring, bloodied hands running through Will’s weighed-down curls. It was the afterimage stained against the black of his eyelids: the two of them soaked in blood, baptized in it, blessed by an unknowable God. It was Hannibal’s mouth on his for a brief moment, one that he realized he had been waiting for since the day of his first breath, before he moved it to his ear. It was the hope that when Will turned them to the cliff’s edge and let them go over, that they would survive the fall and could continue to feed each other’s darkness. 

It was the words that Hannibal had whispered to him just before the world fell away:

_Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo._

  
  
  



End file.
